Literate Programming

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to humans what we want the computer to do. – Donald E. Knuth, Literate Programming, 1984

Examples of literate programming

• ulix a literate, teaching operating system.
• knitr Elegant, flexible and fast dynamic report generation with R
• stich – is a small python library for writing reproducible reports in markdown. It’s heavily inspired by (read: a python clone of) knitr and RMarkdown.
• ferret.org the entire source of Ferret programming language as an emacs org file.

Tools

Literate – A modern literate programming system written in D

brew tap zyedidia/literate
brew install --HEAD zyedidia/literate/literate

In addition to those of CWEB:

• Markdown based – very easy to read and write Literate source.
• Generates readable and commented code in the target language (the generated code is usable by others)
• Reports syntax errors back from the compiler to the right line in the literate source
• Supports any language including syntax highlighting and pretty printing in HTML
• Compatible with Vim (literate.vim)
• Highly customizable (you can add your own HTML or CSS)
• Runs fast – wc.lit compiled for me in 7ms for both code and HTML output
• Supports TeX equations with $ notation.

Inspired from CWEB:

• Automatically generates hyperlinks between code sections
• Formatted output similar to CWEB

I wrote lua4py page using Literate.

See also the Nimib project by Nim programmers.